There is a large literature in macroeconomics that examines the extent to which federal spending “crowds out” investment in the private sector. Basic theory and common sense lead to the conclusion that government spending must replace some private sector spending. After all, dollars are scarce – if the government taxes Paul and uses his money to build a road Paul necessarily has less money to invest in his landscaping business. In theory government spending on public goods like roads could be a net gain. This would occur if the additional value produced by spending one more dollar on roads was greater than the additional value produced by investing one more dollar in Paul’s landscaping business. But even in this scenario, Paul himself may be worse off – he’s one dollar poorer and he may not use the new road – and there is still a dead-weight loss due to the tax.

In reality, the federal government does a lot more than build roads, especially productive ones. In 2014, only 1.9% of federal income tax revenue was spent on transportation. And most of the other stuff that the government does is way less productive, like shuffling money around via entitlement programs – Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security – and investing in businesses that later go bankrupt like Solyndra. So while it is possible that a dollar spent by the government is more productive than a dollar spent by a guy like Paul, in a country with America’s spending habits it’s unlikely to be the case.

The same crowding out that occurs at the federal level can occur at the state level. In fact, in many states state spending as a percentage of gross state product (GSP) exceeds federal spending as a percentage of GDP. The graph below shows state spending as a percentage of GSP for all 50 states and Washington D.C. in 1970, 1990, and 2012 (data). The red, dashed line is federal spending as a percentage of GDP in 2012 (21.9%).

As shown in the graph, nearly every state increased their spending relative to GSP from 1970 – 2012 (triangles are above the X’s). Only one state, South Dakota, had lower spending relative to GSP in 2012 than in 1970. In 2012, 15 of the 50 states spent more as a percentage of GSP than the federal government spent as a percentage of GDP (states where the triangle is above the red, dashed line). In 1990 only two states, Arizona and Montana, spent at that level.

It used to be the case that state and local spending was primarily focused on classic government services like roads, water/sewer systems, police officers, firemen, and K-12 education. But state spending is increasingly looking similar to federal spending. Redistributive public welfare expenditures and pension expenditures have increased substantially since 1992. As an example, the tables below provide a breakdown of some key spending areas for two states, Ohio and Pennsylvania, in 1992 and 2012 (1992 data here, 2012 data here). The dollar per capita amounts are adjusted for inflation and are in 2009 dollars.

As the tables show, spending on public welfare, hospitals, and health increased by 120% in Ohio and 86% in Pennsylvania from 1992 to 2012. Pension expenditures increased by 83% and 125% respectively. And contrary to what many politicians and media types say, funding for higher education – the large majority of state education spending is on higher education – increased dramatically during this time period; up 250% in Ohio and 199% in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, funding for highways – the classic public good that politicians everywhere insist wouldn’t exist without them – has increased by a much smaller amount in both states.

The state spending increases of the recent past are being driven in large part by public welfare programs that redistribute money, pensions for government employees, and higher education. While one could argue that higher education spending is a productive public investment (Milton Friedman didn’t think so and I agree) it is hard to make a case that public welfare and pension payments are good investments. This alone doesn’t mean that society shouldn’t provide those things. Other factors like equity and economic security might be more important to some people than economic productivity. But this does make it unlikely that the marginal dollar spent by a state government today is as economically productive as that dollar spent in the private sector. Like federal spending, state spending is likely crowding out productive private investment, which will ultimately lower output and economic growth in the long run.

One of the strongest predictors of urban growth since the start of the 20th century is the skill level of a city’s population. Cities that have a highly skilled population, usually measured as the share of the population with a bachelor’s degree or more, tend to grow faster than similar cities with less educated populations. This is true at both the metropolitan level and the city level. The figure below plots the population growth of 30 large U.S. cities from 1970 – 2013 on the vertical axis and the share of the city’s 25 and over population that had at least a bachelor’s degree in 1967 on the horizontal axis. (The education data for the cities are here. I am using the political city’s population growth and the share of the central city population with a bachelor’s degree or more from the census data linked to above.)

As shown in the figure there is a strong, positive relationship between the two variables: The correlation coefficient is 0.61. It is well known that over the last 50 years cities in warmer areas have been growing while cities in colder areas have been shrinking, but in this sample the cities in warmer areas also tended to have a better educated population in 1967. Many of the cities known today for their highly educated populations, such as Seattle, San Francisco, and Washington D.C., also had highly educated populations in 1967. Colder manufacturing cities such as Detroit, Buffalo, and Newark had less educated workforces in 1967 and subsequently less population growth.

The above figure uses data on both warm and cold cities, but the relationship holds for only cold cities as well. Below is the same graph but only depicts cities that have a January mean temperature below 40°F. Twenty out of the 30 cities fit this criteria.

Again, there is a strong, positive relationship. In fact it is even stronger; the correlation coefficient is 0.68. Most of the cities in the graph lost population from 1970 – 2013, but the cities that did grow, such as Columbus, Seattle, and Denver, all had relatively educated populations in 1967.

There are several reasons why an educated population and urban population growth are correlated. One is that a faster accumulation of skills and human capital spillovers in cities increase wages which attracts workers. Also, the large number of specialized employers located in cities makes it easier for workers, especially high-skill workers, to find employment. Cities are also home to a range of consumption amenities that attract educated people, such as a wide variety of shops, restaurants, museums, and sporting events.

Another reason why an educated workforce may actually cause city growth has to do with its ability to adjust and innovate. On average, educated workers tend to be more innovative and better able to learn new skills. When there is an negative, exogenous shock to an industry, such as the decline of the automobile industry or the steel industry, educated workers can learn new skills and create new industries to replace the old ones. Many of the mid-20th century workers in Detroit and other Midwestern cities decided to forego higher education because good paying factory jobs were plentiful. When manufacturing declined those workers had a difficult time learning new skills. Also, the large firms that dominated the economic landscape, such as Ford, did not support entrepreneurial thinking. This meant that even the educated workers were not prepared to create new businesses.

Local politicians often want to protect local firms in certain industries through favorable treatment and regulation. But often this protection harms newer, innovative firms since they are forced to compete with the older firms on an uneven playing field. Political favoritism fosters a stagnant economy since in the short-run established firms thrive at the expense of newer, more innovative startups. Famous political statements such as “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country” helped mislead workers into thinking that government was willing and able to protect their employers. But governments at all levels were unable to stop the economic forces that battered U.S. manufacturing.

To thrive in the 21st century local politicians need to foster economic environments that encourage innovation and ingenuity. The successful cities of the future will be those that are best able to innovate and to adapt in an increasingly complex world. History has shown us that an educated and entrepreneurial workforce is capable of overcoming economic challenges, but to do this people need to be free to innovate and create. Stringent land-use regulations, overly-burdensome occupational licensing, certificate-of-need laws, and other unnecessary regulations create barriers to innovation and make it more difficult for entrepreneurs to create the firms and industries of the future.

“Richmond is growing and becoming a more desirable place where people want to live, but that increased demand is putting pressure on the existing housing stock.”

It is true that an increase in the demand for housing will increase prices and rents. Unfortunately, rent control will not solve the problem of too little housing, which is the ultimate cause of high prices.

The diagram above depicts a market for housing like the one in Richmond. Without rent control, when demand increases (D1 to D2) the price rises to R2 and the equilibrium quantity increases from Q1 to Q*. However, with rent control, the price is unable to rise. For example, if the Richmond city council wanted prices to be at the pre-demand-increase level they would set the rent control price equal to R1. But with the increase in demand the quantity demanded at that price is Qd, while the quantity supplied is only Q1. Thus there is a shortage. This is the outcome of a price ceiling.

What this means is that some people will find a place to rent at the old, lower rental price (Q1 people). But more people will want to rent at that price than there are units available, and since the price cannot rise due to the price control, the available apartments will have to be allocated some other way. This means longer wait times for vacant apartments and higher search costs. It also means lower quality apartments. Since the owners know there are more people who want an apartment than available apartments, they don’t have an incentive to maintain the apartment at the same level as they would if they had to attract customers.

With rent control, only Q1 people get an apartment. Without rent control, as the price rises more units are supplied over time and the new equilibrium has Q* (> Q1) people who get an apartment. Yes, they have to pay a higher price, but the relevant alternative is not an apartment at the lower price: The alternative is that some people who would have been willing to pay the higher price do not get an apartment.

Since Richmond has strict land-use rules like many communities in the San Francisco metro area (you can read all about their minimum lot size and parking space requirements here), rent control is adding to the housing woes of Richmond’s renters and any person who would like to move there.

Land-use restrictions decrease the amount of buildable land which subsequently increases the cost of housing. This is depicted in the diagram above as a shift from S1 to S2. The decrease in supply leads to a new equilibrium rent of R2 > R1 and a reduction in the equilibrium quantity to Q2 (< Q1). So land-use restrictions have already decreased the amount of available housing and increased the price.

If rent control is implemented, depicted in the diagram as the solid red line at the old price (R1), then the quantity supplied decreases even more to Qs. Again, with rent control there is a shortage as the quantity of housing demanded at R1 is Q1 (> Qs). So all of the same problems that occurred in the first example occur here, only here the quantity of housing is decreased not once, but TWICE by the government: Once due to the land use restrictions (Q1 to Q2) and then AGAIN when the rent control is implemented (Q2 to Qs). Restricting the amount of housing available does not help more people find housing, and restricting it again exacerbates the problem.

Trying to find an economist who doesn’t think that rent control is a bad idea is like trying to find a cheap apartment in a city with rent control; it can be done, but you have to spend a lot of time looking. In a Booth IGM poll question about rent control, 95% of the economists surveyed disagreed with the statement that rent control had a positive impact on the amount and quality of affordable rental housing. Yet despite basic economic theory, the agreement among experts, and the empirical evidence (see here, here, and here) rent control remains in some places and is often brought up as a viable policy for increasing the amount of affordable housing. This is truly a shame since what places like Richmond need is more housing, not less housing with artificially low prices.

So how did Puerto Rico get into this situation? Like many other places, including Greece and several U.S. cities, the government of Puerto Rico routinely spent more than it collected in revenue and then borrowed to fill the gap as shown in the graph below from Puerto Rico’s Office of Management and Budget. Over a recent 13 year period (2000 – 2012) Puerto Rico ran a deficit each year and accrued $23 billion in debt.

Like other U.S. cities and states, Puerto Rico receives intergovernmental grants from the federal government. As I have explained before, these grants reduce the incentives for a local government to get its fiscal house in order and misallocate resources from relatively responsible, growing areas to less responsible, shrinking areas. As an example, since 1975 Puerto Rico has received nearly $2.7 billion in Community Development Block Grants (CDBG). San Juan, the capital of Puerto Rico, has received over $900 million. The graph below shows the total amount of CDBGs awarded to the major cities of Puerto Rico from 1975 – 2014.

As shown in the graph San Juan has received the bulk of the grant dollars. The graph below shows the amount by year for various years between 1980 and 2014 for San Juan and Puerto Rico as a whole plotted on the left vertical axis (bar graphs). On the right vertical axis is the amount of CDBG dollars per capita (line graphs). San Juan is in orange and Puerto Rico is in blue.

San Juan has consistently received more dollars per capita than the other areas of Puerto Rico. Both total dollars and dollars per capita have been declining since 1980, which is when the CDBG program was near its peak funding level. As part of the 2009 Recovery Act, San Juan received an additional $2.8 million dollars and Puerto Rico as a country received another $5.9 million on top of the $32 million already provided by the program (not shown on the graph).

It’s hard to look at all of this redistribution and not consider whether it did any good. After all, $2.7 billion later Puerto Rico’s economy is struggling and their fiscal situation looks grim. Grant dollars from programs like the CDBG program consistently fail to make a lasting impact on the recipient’s economy. There are structural problems holding Puerto Rico’s economy back, such as the Jones Act, which increases the costs of goods on the island by restricting intra-U.S.-shipping to U.S. ships, and the enforcement of the U.S. minimum wage, which is a significant cost to employers in a place where the median wage is much lower than on the mainland. Intergovernmental grants and transfers do nothing to solve these underlying structural problems. But despite this reality, millions of dollars are spent every year with no lasting benefit.

In a recent blog post I explained how intergovernmental grants subsidize some businesses at the expense of others. But that is just one of several negative features of intergovernmental grants. They also make local governments less accountable for their fiscal decisions by allowing them to increase spending without increasing taxes. The Community Development Blog Grant (CDBG) money that local governments spend on city services or use to subsidize private businesses is provided by taxpayers from all over the country. Unlike locally raised money, when cities spend CDBG money they don’t have to first convince local voters to provide them with the funds. This lack of accountability often results in wasteful spending.

These grants also erode fiscal competition between cities and reduce the incentive to pursue policies that create economic growth. If local governments can receive funds for projects meant to bolster their tax base regardless of their fiscal policies, they have less of an incentive to create a fiscal environment that is conducive to economic growth. The feedback loop between growth promoting policies and actual economic growth is impaired when revenue can be generated independently of such policies e.g. by successfully applying for intergovernmental grants.

Some of the largest recipients of CDBG money are cities that have been declining since the 1950s. The graph below shows the total amount of CDBG dollars given to nine cities that were in the top 15 of the largest cities in the US by population in 1950. (Click on graphs to enlarge. Data used in the graphs are here.)

None of these cities were in the top 15 cities in 2014 and most of them have lost a substantial amount of people since 1950. In Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Buffalo the CDBG money has not reversed or even slowed their decline and yet the federal government continues to give these cities millions of dollars each year. The purpose of these grants is to create sustainable economic development in the recipient cities but it is difficult to argue that such development has occurred.

Contrast the amount of money given to the cities above with that of the cities below:

By 2014 the nine cities in the second graph had replaced the other cities in the top 15 largest US cities by population. Out of the nine cities in the second graph only one, San Antonio, has received $1 billion or more in CDBG funds. In comparison, every city in the first graph has received at least that much.

While there are a lot of factors that contribute to the decline of some cities and the rise of others (such as the general movement of the population towards warmer weather), these graphs are evidence that the CDBG program is incapable of saving Detroit, Buffalo, St. Louis, Cleveland, etc. from population and economic decline. Detroit alone has received nearly $3 billion in CDBG grants over the last 40 years yet still had to declare bankruptcy in 2013. St. Louis, Cleveland, Baltimore, Buffalo, and Milwaukee are other examples of cities that have received a relatively large amount of CDBG funding yet are still struggling with population decline and budget issues. Place-based, redistributive policies like the CDBG program misallocate resources from growing cities to declining cities and reduce the incentive for local governments to implement policies that encourage economic growth.

Moreover, if place-based subsidies, such as the CDBG program, do create some temporary local economic growth, there is evidence that this growth is merely shifted from other areas. In a study on the Tennessee Valley Authority, perhaps the most ambitious place-based program in the country’s history, economists Patrick Kline and Enrico Moretti (2014) found that the economic gains that accrued to the area covered by the TVA were completely offset by losses in other parts of the country. As they state, “Thus, we estimate that the spillovers in the TVA region were fully offset by the losses in the rest of the country…Notably, this finding casts doubt on the traditional big push rationale for spatially progressive subsidies.” This study is further evidence for what other economists have been saying for a long time: Subsidized economic growth in one area, if it occurs, comes at the expense of growth in other areas and does not grow the US economy as a whole.

Intergovernmental grants are grants that are given to one level of government by another e.g. federal to state/local or state to local. In addition to being used on public works and services they also subsidize the development of private goods. The Community Development Block Grant Program (CDBG) is a federally funded grant program that distributes grants and subsidized loans to local and state governments which then use them or award them to other businesses and non-profits. The grants can be used on a variety of projects. Since 1975 the CDBG program has given over $143 billion ($215 billion adjusted for inflation) to state and local governments. The graph below (click to enlarge) shows the total dollars by year adjusted for inflation (2009 dollars) and the number of entitlement grantees by year. While the total amount of funding has declined over time, it was still $2.8 billion in 2014.

Intergovernmental grant programs like CDBG are based on the incorrect idea that moving money around produces economic development and creates a net-positive amount of jobs. But only productive entrepreneurs who create value for consumers can create jobs. The CDBG program and others like it distort the entrepreneurial process and within-industry competition by giving an artificial advantage to the companies that receive grants. This results in more workers and capital flowing into the grant-receiving business rather than their unsubsidized competitors. For example, Brunswick, ME is giving a $350,000 CDBG to Gelato Fiasco to help the company buy new equipment. Meanwhile, nearby competitors Bohemian Coffeehouse, Little Dog Coffee Shop, and Dairy Queen are not receiving any grant money. Governments at all levels, such as Brunswick’s, should not pick winners and losers via a grant process that ultimately favors some constituents over others.

Some other projects that the CDBG program has helped fund are: a soybean processing plant in Arkansas, a new facility for a farmer’s market in Oregon, solar panels for houses in San Diego, and waterfront housing in Burlington, VT. Like the Gelato Fiasco example, these are all examples of private goods, not public, and the production of such goods is best left to the market. If private investors who are subject to market forces are unwilling to produce a private good then it is probably not a worthwhile venture, as the lack of private investment implies that the expected cost exceeds the expected revenue. Private investors and entrepreneurs want to make a profit and the profit incentive promotes wise investments. Governments don’t confront the same profit incentive and this often leads to wasteful spending.

At its best, a government can create the conditions that encourage economic development and job creation: the enforcement of private property rights, a court system to adjudicate disputes, a police force to maintain law and order, and perhaps some basic infrastructure. The scope of a local government should be limited to these tasks.

In a recent NBER working paper, authors Enrico Moretti and Chang-Tai Hsieh analyze how the growth of cities determines the growth of nations. They use data on 220 MSAs from 1964 – 2009 to estimate the contribution of each city to US national GDP growth. They compare what they call the accounting estimate to the model-driven estimate. The accounting estimate is the simple way of attributing city nominal GDP growth to national GDP growth in that it doesn’t account for whether the increase in city GDP is due to higher nominal wages or increased output caused by an increase in local employment. The model-driven estimate that they compare it to distinguishes between these two factors.

Before I go any further it is important to explain the theory behind the author’s empirical findings. Suppose there is a productivity shock to City A such that workers in City A are more productive than they were previously. This productivity shock could be the result of a new method of production or a newly invented piece of equipment (capital) that helps workers make more stuff with a given amount of labor. This productivity shock will increase the local demand for labor which will increase the wage.

Now one of two things can happen and the diagram below depicts the two scenarios. The supply and demand lines are those for workers, with the wage on the Y-axis and the amount of workers on the X-axis. Since more workers lead to more output I also labeled labor as L = αY, where α is some fraction less than 1 to signify that each additional unit of labor doesn’t lead to a one unit increase in output, but rather some fraction of 1 unit (capital is needed too).

City A can have a highly elastic supply of housing, meaning that it is easy to expand the number of housing units in that city and thus it is relatively easy for people to move there. This would mean that the supply of labor is like S-elastic in the diagram. Thus the number of workers that are able to migrate to City A after labor demand increases (D1 to D2) is large, local employment increases (Le > L*), and total output (GDP) increases. Wages only increase a little bit (We > W*). In this situation the productivity shock would have a relatively large effect on national GDP since it resulted in a large increase in local output as workers moved from relatively low-productivity cities to the relatively high-productivity City A.

Alternatively, the supply of housing in City A could be very inelastic; this would be like S-inelastic. If that is the case, then the productivity shock would still increase the wage in City A (Wi > W*), but it will be more difficult for new workers to move in since new housing cannot be built to shelter them. In this case wages increase but since total local employment stays fairly constant due to the restriction on available housing the increase in output is not as large (Li > L* but < Le). If City A output stays relatively constant and instead the productivity shock is expressed in higher nominal wages, then the resulting growth in City A nominal GDP will not have as large of an effect on national output growth.

As an example, Moretti and Hsieh calculate that the growth of New York City’s GDP was 12% of national GDP growth from 1964-2009. But when accounting for the change in wages, New York’s contribution to national output growth was only 5%: Most of New York’s GDP growth was manifested in higher nominal wages. This is not surprising as it is well known that New York has strict housing regulations that make it difficult to build new housing units (the recent extension of NYC rent-control laws won’t help). This makes it difficult for people to relocate from relatively low-productivity places to a high-productivity New York.

In three of the most intensely land-regulated cities: New York, San Francisco, and San Jose, the accounting contribution to national GDP growth was 19.3%. But these cities actual contribution to national output as estimated by the authors was only 6.1%. Contrast that with the Rust Belt cities (e.g. Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, etc.) which contributed -28.5% according to the accounting method but +6.1% according to the author’s model.

The authors conclude that less onerous land-use restrictions in high-productivity cities New York, Washington D.C., Boston, San Francisco, San Jose, and the rest of Silicon Valley could increase the nation’s output growth rate by making it easier for workers to migrate from low to high-productivity areas. In an extreme migration scenario where 52% of American workers in 2009 lived in a different city than they actually did, the author’s calculate that GDP per worker would have been $8,775 higher in 2009, or $6,345 per person. In a more realistic scenario (only 20% of workers lived in a different city) it would have been $3,055 more per person: That is a substantial increase.

While I agree with the author’s conclusion that less land-use restrictions would result in a more productive allocation of labor and thus more stuff for all of us, the author’s policy prescriptions at the end of the paper leave much to be desired. They propose that the federal government constrain the ability of municipalities to set land-use restrictions since these restrictions impose negative externalities on the rest of the country if the form of lowering national output growth. They also support the use of government funded high-speed rail to link low-productivity labor markets to high-productivity labor markets e.g. the current high-speed rail construction project taking place in California could help workers get form low productivity areas like Stockton, Fresno, and Modesto, to high productivity areas in Silicon Valley.

Land-use restrictions are a problem in many areas, but not a problem that warrants arbitrary federal involvement. If federal involvement simply meant the Supreme Court ruling that land-use regulations (or at least most of them) are unconstitutional then I think that would be beneficial; a broad removal of land-use restrictions would go a long way towards reinstituting the institution of private property. Unfortunately, I don’t think that is what Moretti and Hsieh had in mind.

Arbitrary federal involvement in striking down local land-use regulations would further infringe on federalism and create opportunities for political cronyism. Whatever federal bureaucracy was put in charge of monitoring land-use restrictions would have little local knowledge of the situation. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) already monitors some local land use and faulty information along with an expensive appeals process creates problems for residents simply trying to use their own property. Creating a whole federal bureaucracy tasked with picking and choosing which land-use restrictions are acceptable and which aren’t would no doubt lead to more of these types of situations as well as increase the opportunities for regulatory activism. Also, federal land-use regulators may target certain areas that have governors or mayors who don’t agree with them on other issues.

As for more public transportation spending, I think the record speaks for itself – see here, here, and here.

]]>http://neighborhoodeffects.mercatus.org/2015/06/26/local-land-use-restrictions-harm-everyone/feed/3Why regulations that require cabs to be painted the same color are counterproductivehttp://neighborhoodeffects.mercatus.org/2015/06/12/why-regulations-that-require-cabs-to-be-painted-the-same-color-are-counterproductive/
http://neighborhoodeffects.mercatus.org/2015/06/12/why-regulations-that-require-cabs-to-be-painted-the-same-color-are-counterproductive/#commentsFri, 12 Jun 2015 15:19:45 +0000http://neighborhoodeffects.mercatus.org/?p=7447

A few weeks ago, my colleagues Chris Koopman, Adam Thierer and I filed a comment with the FTC on the sharing economy. The comment coincided with a workshop that the FTC held at which Adam was invited to speak. Our comment, our earlier paper (forthcoming in the Pepperdine Journal of Business Entrepreneurship and the Law), and a superb piece that Adam and Chris wrote with MA fellows Anne Hobson and Chris Kuiper, have been getting a fair amount of press attention, most of it positive.

I want to highlight one piece that seems to have misunderstood us. I highlight it not because I blame the author, but because I assume we must not have described our point well. Paul Goddin of MobilityLab writes:

Their argument seems valid, but an example they use is New York City’s rule that taxicabs be painted the same color. They argue this regulation is a barrier to entry, yet neglect to mention that Uber also requires its drivers to adhere with automobile standards (although these standards have been loosened recently). As of this article, Uber’s drivers must possess a late-model 2005 sedan (2000 in some cities, 2007-08 in others), with specific color and make restrictions for those who operate the company’s Black car service.

A rule that requires everyone in an industry to use the exact same equipment, branding and paint color is, I suppose, a barrier to entry. But that isn’t why we raised the issue. We raise it because—more importantly—it is a barrier to signaling quality.

It is a good thing that Uber and Lyft require their drivers to adhere to standards, just as it is a good thing that TGI Fridays and CocaCola set their own standards. Walk into a TGI Fridays anywhere in the world and you will encounter a familiar experience. That is because the company sets standards for its recipes, its decorations, its employee’s behavior, its uniforms, and much else. Similarly strict standards govern the way CocaCola is packaged, and marketed. Retailers that operate soda fountains are all supposed to combine the syrup and the carbonated water in the same way. If they don’t, they may find that CocaCola no longer wants to work with them.

These practices ensure quality. And they help overcome what would otherwise be a significant information asymmetry between the buyer and the seller. But notice that these signals only work because they are tied to the brands. Imagine what would happen if Chili’s, Outback Steakhouse, and Macaroni Grill were all required by law to adopt the same logos, the same decor, the same recipes, and the same uniforms as TGI Fridays. Customers would have no way of distinguishing between the brands, and therefore the companies would have little incentive to provide quality service in order to protect their reputations. Who cares about cooking a T Bone properly if the other guys are likely to get blamed for it?

So here in lies the problem with taxi regulations that require all cabs to offer the same sort of service, right down to the color of their cars: If every cab looks the same, no one cab company has an incentive to carefully guard its reputation.

I just made my first LearnLiberty video. To be more precise, the stellar talent at The Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University made the video and they let me tag along for the fun. It combines dinosaurs and rent-seeking. What could be more terrifying? Watch. Comment. And share!

Last week, Mercatus published a new working paper that I coauthored with Pavel Yakovlev of Duquesne University. It addresses an understudied institutional difference between states. Some state legislative chambers allow one committee to write both spending and taxing bills while others separate these functions into two separate committees.

This institutional difference first caught my eye a few years ago when Nick Tuszynski and I reviewed the literature on institutions and state spending. Among 16 different institutions that we looked at—from strict balanced budget requirements to term limits to “item reduction vetoes”—one stood out. Previous research by Mark Crain and Timothy Muris had found that states in which separate committees craft taxing and spending bills spend significantly less per capita than states in which a single committee was responsible for both kinds of bills. As you can see from the figure below (click to enlarge), the effect was estimated to be many times larger than that found for almost any other institution:

But as large as this effect seems to be, the phenomenon has largely been ignored. To our knowledge, Crain and Muris are the only ones to have studied it. Their paper was now two decades old and was based on a relatively small sample of years from the 1980s.

To get a fresh look at the phenomenon, my colleagues and I consulted state statutes, legislative rules, committee websites and members’ offices. We created a unique data set that for some states spans 40 years. We took a cautious approach, coding taxing and spending functions as not separate in any chambers in which it was possible for a tax bill to come out of a spending committee and vice versa. We found that in 25 states, these functions are separate in both chambers, in 7 states they are separate in one chamber, and in the rest, these functions are separate in neither chamber.

To control for other confounding factors, we also gathered data on economic, demographic, and institutional differences between the states. Controlling for these factors, we found that separate taxing and spending committees are, indeed, associated with less spending. To be precise:

Other factors being equal, we find that those states with separate taxing and spending committees spend between $300 and $450 less per capita (between $790 and $1,200 less per household) than other states.

Our full paper is here, a summary is here, and my post at US News is here. Comments welcome.

A few years ago, I produced a figure which showed inflation-adjusted state and local expenditures alongside inflation-adjusted private GDP.

It’s been some time since I made that chart and so I thought I might revisit the question. This time around, I compared state and local expenditures with overall GDP, not just private GDP.

The results are below (click to enlarge).

After adjusting for inflation, the economy is about 5.79 times its 1950 size. This is a good thing. It means more is being produced and more is available for consumption. And since the population has only doubled over this period, it means that per capita production is way up.

Over the same time period, however, state and local government expenditures have not just gone up 5 or 6 or even 8 times. Instead, after adjusting for inflation, state and local governments are spending about 12.79 times as much as they spent in 1950.

State and local governments, of course, depend entirely on the economy for their resources. As I put it when I produced the original chart, this is like a household whose income has grown about 6-fold but whose spending habits have grown nearly 13-fold.

But aren’t things different in the midst of a major economic and financial crisis? Shouldn’t we have more leeway for bailouts in exigent circumstances?

No. Here is why:

First, we should always remember that the concentrated beneficiaries of a bailout have every incentive to overstate its necessity while the diffuse interests that pay for it (other borrowers, taxpayers, un-favored competitors, and the future inheritors of a less dynamic and less competitive economy) have almost no incentive or ability to get organized and lobby against it.

Bailout proponents talk as if they know bailouts avert certain calamity. But the truth is that we can never know exactly what would have happened without a bailout. We can, however, draw on both economic theory and past experience. And both suggest that the macroeconomy of a world without bailouts is actually more stable than one with bailouts. This is because bailouts incentivize excessive risk (and, importantly, correlated risk taking). Moreover, because the bailout vs. no bailout call is inherently arbitrary, bailouts generate uncertainty.

Todd Zywicki at GMU law argues convincingly that normal bankruptcy proceedings would have worked just fine in the case of the autos.

Moreover, as Garett Jones and Katelyn Christ explain, alternative options like “speed bankruptcy” (aka debt-to-equity swaps) offer better ways to improve the health of institutions without completely letting creditors off the hook. This isn’t just blind speculation. The EU used this approach in its “bail in” of Cyprus and it seems to have worked pretty well.

Ironically, one can make a reasonable case that many (most?) bailouts are themselves the result of previous bailouts. The 1979 bailout of Chrysler taught a valuable lesson to the big 3 automakers and their creditors. It showed them that Washington would do whatever it took to save them. That, and decades of other privileges allowed the auto makers to ignore both customers and market realities.

Indeed, at least some of the blame for the entire 2008 debacle falls on the ‘too big to fail’ expectation that systematically encouraged most large financial firms to leverage up. While it was hardly the only factor, the successive bailouts of Continental Illinois (1984), the S&Ls (1990s), the implicit guarantee of the GSEs, etc., likely exacerbated the severity of the 2008 financial crisis. So a good cost-benefit analysis of any bailout should include some probability that it will encourage future excessive risk taking, and future calls for more bailouts. Once these additional costs are accounted for, bailouts look like significantly worse deals.

Adherence to the “rule of law” is more important in a crisis than it is in normal times. Constitutional prohibitions, statutory limits, and even political taboos are typically not needed in “easy cases.” It is the hard cases that make for bad precedent.

Stephen Walters, Professor of Economics at Loyola University Maryland, has written a new book called Boom Towns. I’ve written a review for the Library of Law and Liberty. Here is the beginning:

Capital, in the 21st century, has a bad rap. Many say that because it is the source of “passive income,” it does nothing but pad the pockets of the idle rich, driving a wedge between the haves and the have-nots. It’s helpful, then, to be reminded that capital in all its forms is the source of human betterment. Capital is the accumulated stock of stuff (financial assets, physical equipment, human knowhow, even social connections) that helps us make and do more stuff. So policies that drain capital from a community or discourage its formation in the first place are likely to leave a trail of destruction. This is the central lesson of Stephen J.K. Walters’ Boom Towns: Restoring the Urban American Dream.

Here is another excerpt:

In some cases, reformers’ cures for urban decay have been worse than the disease. Title I of the Housing Act of 1949 is a case in point. It made federal dollars available to cities that bulldozed property in blighted areas and turned it over to private developers. While earlier reforms had sought to replace tenements with public housing, Title I allowed funds to be used for “shiny new office towers, upscale apartments, convention centers, or hotels.” By 1967, some 400,000 housing units had been razed, but only 10,760 low-rent dwellings had been built to replace them. The result was “an intra-urban diaspora” as about two million, mostly Black, residents were displaced. Though it is impossible to quantify precisely, Walters rightly emphasizes the significance of this unfathomable loss in social capital as people were driven from the communities that had sustained them for generations.

After I wrote this, a friend pointed me to this moving Reason video, written and produced by Jim Epstein and narrated by Nick Gillespie:

Over a century ago, the Italian political economist Amilcare Puviani suggested that policy makers have a strong incentive to obscure the cost of government. Known as “fiscal illusion,” the idea is that voters will be willing to spend more money on government if they think its costs is lower than it actually is. Fiscal illusion explains a great deal of public choices, including the popularity of deficit spending.

It also explains why the public knows the least about some of the most controversial items in the public budget such as corporate welfare. But some would like to change this. Here are Jess Fields and Tom “Smitty” Smith, writing in the (subscription required) Austin-American Statesman:

Texans believe in government transparency and accountability. For this reason, we have some of the most advanced open-government initiatives in the nation. Yet one policy area remains outside the view of the general public: economic development.

When local governments cut deals that result in millions in incentives, they can do it behind closed doors in “executive session” — legally — thanks to exceptions to the Open Meetings and Public Information Acts for “economic development negotiations.”

Fields is a senior policy analyst at the free enterprise Texas Public Policy Foundation, while Smith is the director of the Texas office of Public Citizen, a progressive consumer advocacy group started by Ralph Nader in the ‘70s.

Texans aren’t the only ones interested in making corporate welfare more transparent. The Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) is considering rules that would require governments to report the tax privileges that they hand out to businesses. Here is Liz Farmer, writing in Governing Magazine:

Specifically, GASB is proposing that state and local governments disclose information about property and other tax abatement agreements in their annual financial statements. If approved, the new disclosures could shed light on an area of government finance and provide hard data on information that is assembled sporadically, if at all. Scores of public and private groups support the proposal and it has proven to be one of GASB’s most debated topic yet, as nearly 300 groups or individuals submitted comment letters to the board. But many still say the requirements don’t go far enough.

She notes that the proposal misses a number of tax privileges including:

I have a new essay, coauthored with two of my former students, Anna Mills and Dana Williams. We just published a piece in Real Clear Policy summarizing it. Here is a selection of the OpEd:

Liberals, conservative, and libertarians agree on the goals: Patients should have access to innovative, low-cost, and high-quality care. And though another round of federal reform may be years off, a number of state-level changes can move us closer to a competitive and patient-centered health-care market, making it possible to realize these shared aspirations.

In a new paper published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, we identify three areas for reform: States can eliminate certificate-of-need laws, liberalize scope-of-practice regulations, and end the regulatory barriers to telemedicine.

I haven’t had much time for blogging lately but I’m going to try to get back into the swing of things. Back in December, I had this to say in Real Clear Markets:

The eminent political economist (and my former professor) Gordon Tullock, passed away last month at the age of 92. His greatest contribution to economic understanding was a funny-sounding concept: “rent seeking.” Funny sounding or not, this idea-perhaps more than any other economic idea developed in the last century-explains what ails our moribund economy. And, as strange as this may sound, a pair of rock star dinosaur hunters form the 1880s can help us understand what exactly rent seeking is and why it’s such a problem.

You can read the rest here. FYI: I didn’t choose the title and am not crazy about it.

Two weeks ago, I sat down with CSPAN’s Greta Wodele Brawner to talk about “lame duck” sessions of Congress. Drawing on my research with colleagues Chris Koopman and Emily Washington, we discussed the ways in which roll call voting patterns differ during lame duck sessions compared with ordinary sessions.

A few times I struck a relatively upbeat tone about what might get accomplished in the next two years. Only two weeks old, I worry that some of these comments already seem wildly optimistic. Let me know what you think.

Can one state enforce another state’s laws that prohibit direct-to-consumer wine shipment from out-of-state retailers while allowing it by in-state retailers? That’s the question posed in a recent New York case.

The New York State Liquor Authority has a rule that prohibits licensees from engaging in “improper conduct.” The liquor regulator argues that direct shipments by retailers that violate other states’ laws constitute improper conduct. It has fined, revoked licenses, and filed charges against New York retailers that it believes have shipped wine illegally to customers in other states. One retailer, Empire Wine, refused to settle and has sued the liquor authority in state court, claiming that the “improper conduct” rule is unconstitutionally vague and that the liquor authority cannot enforce other states’ laws that discriminate against interstate commerce.

Many states continue to prohibit direct shipment from out-of-state retailers. For example, 40 states do not allow New York retailers to ship directly to consumers. This harms consumers, because it is usually out-of state-retailers, rather than wineries, that offer significant savings compared to in-state retailers. In a 2013 article published in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Alan Wiseman and I identified two different anti-consumer effects of laws that allow out-of-state wineries to ship direct to consumer but prohibit out-of-state retailers from doing so. First, these laws deprive consumers of price savings from buying many bottles online: “Online retailers consistently offered price savings on much higher percentages of the bottles in each year—between 57 and 81 percent of the bottles when shipped via ground and between 32 and 48 percent when shipped via air. Excluding retailers from direct shipment thus substantially reduces—but does not completely eliminate—the price savings available from purchasing wine online.” Second, these laws reduce competitive pressure on bricks-and-mortar wine stores, since they exclude lower-priced out-of-state retailers from the local market. Thus, the laws likely harm consumers who buy from their local wine shops, not just consumers who want to buy online. (The published version of the paper is behind a paywall, but you can read the working paper version at SSRN.)